An Economist Nitpicks Sci-Fi: Foundation and Chaos

Welcome back to An Economist Nitpicks Sci-Fi, a series where I evaluate the plot and setting of science fiction works. The main point of difference for this series is that I am examining the works not through a literary or physical science perspective (both of which are fairly common on the internet), but rather through the perspective of an economist.

In this post, I will be looking at the central trilogy of Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov: These being Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. Since I will be discussing psychohistory, which is an integral part of the Foundation series, I will be discussing full spoilers for these three books. Because it will be impossible to make sense of this post without looking at spoilers, these spoilers will be unmarked. If spoilers for Foundation are a dealbreaker for you, then I suggest abandoning this post now.

Foundation and Seldon

Foundation is a story about the dying centuries of a galactic empire 10,000 years in the future. More than that, it is the story of an initially small foundation of scientists tasked with returning the galaxy to civilisation as quickly as possible as the empire collapses. The eponymous Foundation works at the behest of Hari Seldon – a social scientist with capabilities as far beyond the abilities of modern economists, sociologists and psychologists as Faster than Light travel is beyond the capability of modern physicists and engineers. For Seldon has invented a new social science, psychohistory, which gives him the ability to forecast the inevitable collapse of the Empire, even though in his lifetime it still looks unassailable. And while his science also tells him that it is too late to stop the Empire’s collapse, he can see a way to reduce the period of barbarism and anarchy that will grip the galaxy for 30,000 years down to only 1,000. This is the task he creates the Foundation for, a task he will not live to see begin, much less end: to grow into a power that can bring science and order back to the galaxy as quickly as possible.

Foundation, the story and the organisation, is inherently tied up with Seldon and psychohistory. And this is an interesting twist to science fiction – normally science fiction stores involve advanced physical science, but Foundation is fairly unusual in having the key focus of the story be an advanced social science. I am not the only economist to find this interesting – Paul Krugman has cited Foundation as an inspiration for him becoming an economist.

Seldon’s ability to predict what obstacles the Foundation will face, and to make advance plans accordingly, is what drives the Foundation to start realising its purpose as the final guardian of galactic civilisation. This means that the plausibility of Foundation rests on the plausibility of psychohistory. So how plausible is psychohistory as science fiction?

First off, I will surprise no one by pointing out nothing like psychohistory exists in the world today. Many social sciences (including economics) make forecasts and predictions about future outcomes, but only in very narrow domains, over fairly short time periods and with limited success. But this is hardly a deal-killer for science fiction, after all faster than light travel, elemental transmutation, and advanced nuclear technologies are also on display in Foundation. Science fiction is about extrapolating science in plausible ways, so the question we need to ask is could a future society invent psychohistory? To answer that, we need to look at what Foundation says about psychohistory and how it works.

Psychohistory: The Foundation of Foundation

In Foundation, Hari Seldon, the pre-eminent authority on psychohistory, describes it as the application of statistical methods to history and psychology. The logic is that with sufficient historical data, and sufficient understanding of human psychology, it should be possible to build a model of human behaviour that takes current and historical geopolitical conditions as an input and produces forecasts of future geopolitical conditions as an output. These predictions would not be certainties, but they would show the likely and plausible arc of future history.

This is not a novel or radical concept – basically all forecasting works this way. Sometimes it works well, and other times poorly. A lot of a model’s performance depends on how much data the forecaster has and how well the forecaster understands the phenomenon in question. From a plausibility standpoint, I am happy to concede that a hypothetical future society could overcome the data and conceptual barriers to producing a good-quality historical forecasting model. That’s not a bigger claim than that physicists may one day build a faster-than-light drive.

There are, however, two other objections that are harder to wave away. Asimov, to his credit, does anticipate these issues to some degree, so I will be explaining each of these issues, how Asimov tries to deal with them, and how successful I think he was.

The First Problem: Adaptation

One thing that makes social science different from (and more complicated than) physical sciences is that when you study humans, they study you back. Humans are fairly unusual among the class of known phenomena in that they can read the papers you publish and change their actions or beliefs accordingly. This can result in your model trying to predict itself embedding a feedback effect – your model’s outputs get reduced to random noise.

This is not a strictly theoretical problem, as a couple of historical examples from economics and finance will demonstrate:

The Monday Effect: Once academic finance really got going, one of the notable results researchers discovered was The Monday Effect – share prices tended to be slightly higher on Mondays than on other days, accounting for as many confounds as the researchers could identify. This was important because it was a rare piece of evidence against the Efficient Market Hypothesis – a pattern like this could not be explained if the market was making proper use of the information available to it. However as research on the effect developed, later researchers found they could not replicate the earlier results. This was not an epistemic problem – the phenomenon was visible in older data, but not in newer data that had been subsequently released. What had happened is that financial markets had noticed all the academic chatter about the Monday effect, and traders had changed their trading behaviour to take advantage of it. Like with any arbitrage opportunity, exploiting the Monday Effect caused it to disappear. In other words, identifying and studying the Monday Effect caused it to disappear.

The Phillips Curve: Bill Phillips was an early 20th Century economist who identified a relationship between inflation rates and unemployment – specifically, the more of one a country had, the less of the other it tended to have. This attracted a lot of attention at the time, because this jibed with Keynes’s then-recent ideas about using stimulus to combat recessions. The relationship Phillips identified formed the basis of macroeconomic policy for much of the world for the 1940s through to the 1980s. Unemployment is a much larger social problem than inflation, so the reasoning went, and therefore governments should use stimulus to drive up inflation and thereby keep unemployment low. This worked great until the 1970s when things came to a head. The stimulus was producing inflation like it always did, but the resulting employment effects were getting weaker and weaker, leading to stagflation (a combination of high unemployment and high inflation in flagrant violation of what the Phillips Curve predicts). The solution to this paradox was discovered by Milton Friedman in the late 1960s. It turns out that the relationship between inflation and unemployment Phillips observed only applies when the inflation is a surprise to the economy. Back before government engineered inflation rates, every change in inflation was a surprise, so the relationship looked robust. By implementing stimulus, governments had changed the population’s expectations of future inflation, and thereby permanently shifted the Phillips Curve in a way that utterly frustrated the stimulus programme. The modern Expectations-Augmented Phillips Curve includes an additional term to account for people’s expectations of inflation, as a separate variable from inflation itself.

To Asimov’s credit, adaptation is something he anticipates and accounts for well in Foundation. Seldon keeps his math hidden from the general population, keeping it among his team rather than publishing it academically. Equally, when the Foundation is established, he does not share his methods with them, instead leaving them ignorant of psychohistory . He passes his knowledge on to a second foundation (imaginatively named The Second Foundation), which stays hidden from the first Foundation, refining psychohistory and Seldon’s Plan in secret. Seldon’s reasoning in maintaining this level of secrecy is precisely that wider knowledge of psychohistory and its methods would invalidate Seldon’s predictions. So I am giving Foundation a passing mark for its response to Adaptation.

The Second Problem: Chaos

The future is difficult to predict [citation needed]. Any attempt to predict what is going to happen requires taking what we do know about how causes lead to effects and using that to find the most likely effects of the existing known causes. The precise methods of doing this vary widely, and understanding even a few of them can take years of education, but broadly speaking there are two high-level structures that are used to predict something an analyst cannot model precisely. The process underlying a phenomenon’s behaviour can be described as either stochastic or chaotic.

The nature of stochastic and chaotic processes are a topic that takes years to understand fully (as it is, I know the basics of chaos theory, but no more than that), but here is a quick example that will hopefully shed some light on the difference.

Consider a spinning top on a table. How would you model the top’s movement across the table so you could forecast its position in a minute’s time? The answer will depend on a combination of large and small factors:

There are factors that pertain to any possible spin of the top, such as whether the table is perfectly level, or has an incline at all. Call these Systematic Effects.

Then there are factors that relate to any one spin, such as how hard it is spun, and whether the spinner imparts any bias in how it moves based on how they spin it. These are Unsystematic Effects.

This is typical of a stochastic process – a series of small effects will move the top over time but each little movement will not be dramatic on its own, so the range of probable locations of the top is fairly predictable. This gets more important if instead of predicting a single spin, you predict the average of a large number of spins of the top. The unsystematic effects on the top for each spin will tend to cancel out, meaning that only the systematic effects will matter. This makes modelling the top much easier, and the range of uncertainty around the average top’s position will grow steadily smaller as more and more spins are averaged together. So along as you understand the systematic forces that effect the spins of the top, you can predict the pattern of top spins quite reliably.

This property of stochastic processes, The Law of Large Numbers, can make them quite predictable if your sample sizes are large enough. It’s the reason opinion polls can predict elections quite well even though they only ask about 1000 people who they plan to vote for.

However, since the 1950s, further advances in mathematics have shown that not all processes follow this logic.

Let’s go back to our spinning top, but instead of a table, let’s take the top and spin it on top of an upturned bowl. The bottom of the bowl is flat, so while the top is near its origin point, it will act the same way it did in the previous example, but as soon as it hits the bowl’s sloped sides it will slide right down to the rim of the bowl and never return. This makes predicting the top’s location harder, not just because the top moves away from its origin faster but because the endpoint for the top can be radically different based on small changes in how it moves shortly after being placed on the bowl. Predicting the top’s location even vaguely depends on being able to successfully predict the first few steps the top takes away from its origin. And note that this is a fairly simple example, a surface with many slopes and plateaus at different angles would be even harder to predict. This property, metastability, is an important component of chaotic processes.

Unlike in a stochastic process, the Law of Large Numbers doesn’t help us much with a chaotic process. Let’s suppose our surface has a slight unobserved bias that causes the top to move East more often in its first second than in any other direction. On the flat table, this isn’t a big deal; sure, our estimate will be off, but it will only be slightly off. But this same bias in the bowl would have a massive effect: the increased odds of the top falling toward the eastern rim of the bowl (and reduced odds of falling to the western rim) will move the average top endpoint right over to the eastern rim. In a stochastic model small data errors lead to small prediction errors, but in a chaotic system even small errors in your initial data can ruin your model. This is why weather forecasting is so hard; you miss the air displaced by the flight of a single butterfly and your model can miss a hurricane. It also means that chaotic systems tend to have a predictive horizon – predicting a chaotic process is workable up to a certain point in the future, but becomes highly unpredictable beyond that.

So why does all of this this have to do with psychohistory? According to Hari Seldon, psychohistory is a statistical science: it cannot predict events with certainty, but it performs well at predicting the scope of human history. The logic is that human idiosyncracies are naturally smoothed out in large populations, leading to a largely predictable pattern. In other words, psychohistory operates on the premise that the progress of history is a stochastic process – some details will escape the psychohistorian’s attention, so as time passes it gets harder and harder to predict the future, but this is a gradual loss of predictive power rather than a dramatic decline.

But is history stochastic or chaotic? Consider this history of the 20th Century – the entire geopolitical structure of the world radically changed. Most of the major empires of the world either fell or were radically diminished, leading to a bipolar conflict between the USA and the USSR (one being a minor power in the 19th Century, while the other didn’t exist at all). And then in the final decade the USSR itself collapsed, leading to a monopolar environment with the USA unchallenged for dominance. What would a psychohistorian in 1899 need to know to predict geopolitics in 1999?

The first thing you’d need to predict is World War One. And that was precipitated by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists, so your model will need to account for every tiny band of nationalists and could-be assassins who could disrupt the balance of power in Europe.

On the other hand, Europe was a powder keg in the 1910s. Maybe the precipitating event doesn’t matter much. One could argue that WWI was going to happen anyway, and all the Serbian nationalists did was change the timing a little. That’s a fair point, but what effect would changing WWI’s timing have? For example, what is the probability that Corporal Adolf Hitler would have been killed if the times and places of battles in WWI were slightly different? I have to assume it’s high, since the death rate of front line soldiers in WWI was very high. And what would WWII look like if Hitler had died? Would it have happened at all?

For that matter, if WWI had happened a little earlier or later, what effect would that have had on the Russian Revolution? Would different timing have favoured the Mensheviks over the Bolsheviks? Might the revolution have been thwarted entirely? Try to imagine the back half of the 20th Century without the USSR.

Now consider every other thing that could have affected a major world event in the 20th Century.

While Seldon never talks about predictive horizons for psychohistory (which is not surprising since the math hadn’t been invented yet), Asimov has a character in Foundation and Empire that highlights the effects that chaos would have on psychohistory – The Mule. The Mule is a mutant, infertile (hence the name), but with mental powers that allow him to control the emotions of those around him. This gives him the power to manipulate large groups of people – turn bitter foes into loyal subordinates and destroy the morale of whole planets at long range. The quirks of human biology that gave rise to the Mule were outside psychohistory’s scope, but are large enough that they don’t cancel out even at a galactic scale. One of the best scenes in Foundation and Empire has the citizenry of the Foundation gathered at Seldon’s vault to hear one of his pre-recorded predictions of where the Foundation would be at this point, and what problems it would be facing – only for it to prove that he failed to predict the Mule’s appearance, leaving Seldon’s pronouncements useless.

But Asimov doesn’t just show the effect of chaos, he also show how chaos can be dealt with – don’t try to predict the top’s spin, but rather change the shape of the surface it spins on. Seldon deliberately established the Foundation on a remote, mineral-poor planet to minimise the number of variables that could disrupt the plan. And what ends the Mule’s threat isn’t the psychohistorical forces that stopped every previous threat but the Second Foundation – a secret group of psychohistorians who covertly monitor The Foundation and intervene to keep it on track if something unexpected comes up. On top of that, the Second Foundation continues to refine both psychohistory and Seldon’s plan, giving the plan the greatest possible chance of succeeding.

From an economics perspective, Foundation was more plausible than I had expected. Don’t get me wrong, I doubt we’ll ever be able to build geopolitical models as good as Seldon’s, and Mule-like disruptions would be far more common than Asimov portrays (I also very much doubt that advanced social science knowledge will ever bestow people with psychic powers), but Asimov made a serious effort to figure out what a good social science model would and wouldn’t be able to do, and how one might deal with some of forecasting’s weaknesses.

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James is a government policy analyst, and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. His interests including wargaming, computer gaming (especially RPGs and strategy games), Dungeons & Dragons and scepticism. No part of any of his posts or comments should be construed as the position of any part of the New Zealand government, or indeed any agency he may be associated with.

46 Responses

This is why weather forecasting is so hard; you miss the air displaced by the flight of a single butterfly and your model can miss a hurricane.

No. If air had no viscosity (if it was inviscid) tiny inputs would matter, but the viscosity of air and the turbulence that results from it, will damp any of those kids of inputs. Weather is driven primarily by heat and pressure, so while a butterfly can’t do anything, a forest fire most certainly can (although it wouldn’t trigger a hurricane).Report

In other words, identifying and studying the Monday Effect caused it to disappear.

Something smilier can happen in programming. For instance, if a bug is timing-related, adding additional tracing to investigate it can cause it to disappear. If it’s a memory smash, recompiling to include more debugging information can mean that different memory is overwritten, hiding the problem.Report

It also means that chaotic systems tend to have a predictive horizon – predicting a chaotic process is workable up to a certain point in the future, but becomes highly unpredictable beyond that.

Is this a TRUE statement, like the uncertainty principle, that there is a hard limit to the predictability of chaotic systems, or is it just that we do not have the mathematical or computational tools to extend the predictive horizon indefinitely?

If the latter, I’ll posit that 10,000 years have solved the problem. Hari Seldon’s contribution was actually developing the mathematical tools to extend this predictive horizon.Report

Digital electronics is full of situations where predicting when transitions will occur becomes nearly impossible, at least if there’s any noise mixed in: hysteresis, metastability, the effects of switching time versus propagation time, transient periods where cascading failures become possible, etc. I would think it at least arguable that large complex social systems have similar features.Report

It’s not precisely a hard cap, but the problem isn’t mathematical – the issue stems from tiny unobserved features of your data having larger and larger effects over time. Better computing power helps a little, but the computing power required to make small gains in forecast length explodes. You very quickly reach a point where a galaxy’s worth of perfect computing material wouldn’t be enough.Report

I thought the problem *was* mathematical, in that one can show many examples of non-linear iterative equations where small changes to the initial inputs yield vastly different outputs after a few iterations. Or at least that’s what I understood from a math class on chaos and fractals some 25 years ago.Report

What would a psychohistorian in 1899 need to know to predict geopolitics in 1999?

The first thing you’d need to predict is World War One. And that was precipitated by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists, so your model will need to account for every tiny band of nationalists and could-be assassins who could disrupt the balance of power in Europe. On the other hand, Europe was a powder keg in the 1910s. Maybe the precipitating event doesn’t matter much. One could argue that WWI was going to happen anyway, and all the Serbian nationalists did was change the timing a little. That’s a fair point,….

It is indeed a fair point – The Great Powers had spent the last 20 years planning for this specific war – a war between the Central Powers and vs Russia+France, centered on a Balkan issue (Would Britain be neutral or side with France was more of an open question). The war was going to happen sooner or later, and there were important reasons, mostly economic (the industrial development of Russia and whether or not it could catch up with Germany) why the Central Powers wanted the war to happen as soon as it was diplomatically possible

but what effect would changing WWI’s timing have? For example, what is the probability that Corporal Adolf Hitler would have been killed if the times and places of battles in WWI were slightly different? I have to assume it’s high, since the death rate of front line soldiers in WWI was very high. And what would WWII look like if Hitler had died? Would it have happened at all?

I think it is fairly easy for psychohistory to predict that the Peace that would follow WWI would be a very harsh one. Given Versailles, the rise of a populist government in Germany focused on revenge is fairly plausible. Would taht government also engage in the Final solution is more an open question, but teh popularity of Jews iall over Europe at that time was not very high in any country.

For that matter, if WWI had happened a little earlier or later, what effect would that have had on the Russian Revolution? Would different timing have favoured the Mensheviks over the Bolsheviks? Might the revolution have been thwarted entirely? Try to imagine the back half of the 20th Century without the USSR.

The Romanov Dynasty was doomed. The more the Romanovs tried to reinforce their power, the more certain the Revolution would have been. The February Revolution was headed by a bourgeoisie that was but a tiny minority in the country, and almost inexistent outside of Moscow and St Petersburg. It has really no contact with the masses of peasants and soldiers, and could not command their loyalty. A Bolshevik government is a stronger probability

I think it is fairly easy for psychohistory to predict that the Peace that would follow WWI would be a very harsh one. Given Versailles, the rise of a populist government in Germany focused on revenge is fairly plausible

This is the step I don’t buy. Versailles was the result of narrowly specific circumstances, starting with who says Germany was doomed from the start to losing?Report

Indeed there are good theoretical reasons to assume that the outcome of any war that actually happened is hard to predict – if the outcome was highly predictable, it is unlikely the war would be fought at all since both side would realised the likely outcome and would settle tier conflict by less destructive means.Report

I largely agree with this, @j_a . Our hypothetical 1899 psychohistorian wouldn’t even necessarily need to know how all the alliances in WWI broke down, only the major powers on each side and the eventual victor. Nor would she need to know the mode of victory, be that on the battlefield or through diplomacy.

Two Mules to her might have been the United States and Mexico — if the USA entered or not seems like a murkier question, although if it did it would have joined the Great Powers rather than the Central Allies. And Mexico’s neutrality would also not have been certain; the psychohistorian might have made a mistake and projected Mexico would have become Germany’s catspaw, exactly as Germany would have wanted. (Though a political antipathy atop strong economic interaction would likely have happened anyway.)

And we can play psychohistorian in 2018, too. It’s not difficult to foresee the United States’ flirtation with populism and nominal isolationism souring relations with other significant powers, and that leading to a quadripolar world, with foci of power in Washington, Brussels, Moscow, and Beijing. And that, in turn, sounds a lot like the Concert of Europe writ global and with nuclear weapons, and if the prospect of THAT doesn’t chill you to the bone, nothing will.Report

It’s definitely not the case the everything has already been invented – over the course of the series The Foundation continues to make scientific advances. The Old Empire is described as technologically moribund – this is seen as part of the reasons for its decline. Over the course of the series the Empire actually decays in technology, as it loses the institutional support for maintaining its scientific knowledge.

As an aside, there’s a passage early on in Foundation that talks about how the technological base of some of the outer provinces has severely decayed. Some of the characters note with shock that these provinces no longer have atomic power, and despair at how primitive a society must be to be reliant purely on chemical power sources. I laughed when I read this, it wasn’t a happy laugh, but I did laugh.Report

The thing you would need to get right, though, assuming the goal is to predict the shape of the world rather than the details, is global conventional war ending with the rise of two nuclear-armed superpowers by 1950. Which superpowers is a relatively minor detail. The next thing that you would have to get right is that MAD works and civilization survives until 1999. I always interpreted psychohistory as being about getting the shape right, not the details. Getting that 1950 right in 1899 would be astounding: the neutron, key to building the Bomb, wasn’t theorized until 1919 and not discovered until 1932.

Then, in 1949, the intrepid psychohistorians project to 1999. What are they likely to miss that would be in place by 1999 and shape the 50 years beyond that? Well, what almost all of the science fiction authors missed at that time was ubiquitous high-powered computing. How many times does the discussion here degenerate into arguing over whether computing is about to create a post-scarcity world, or a collapse back into serfdom (serfs with smart phones, mind you).

My complaint about the Foundation universe is that technicalogical progress — aside from psychohistory itself, an advancement in math — seems to have essentially stopped.Report

To know that you’d have to know what technology was going to be developed. That’s one of the reasons predicting human behaviour is so hard – in order to do it you also have to predict everything else successfully.Report

I don’t think the specifics of the technology are that important, but rather what effect certain classes of technology can have on a population.

Look at the internet. You could say that there was no way to predict the impacts the internet would have on people, but looking back at things, starting with, say, the printing press, you could model how advances in information technology as a class can impact people. And if you have 10000 years of data, across multiple planets, where technology waxes and wanes, you might be able to come up with something.

What you have to watch out for is something that utterly breaks your classifications. Something that comes out of left field and adds a completely new archetype to your model.Report

My complaint about the Foundation universe is that technicalogical progress — aside from psychohistory itself, an advancement in math — seems to have essentially stopped.

My distant recollection is that the Empire was explicitly presented as being culturally moribund. IIRC, there was a bit about how scholars studied the works of earlier scholars, and it would never occur to them to do original research. Given the context, I take this as a stereotyped and not particularly accurate version of Late Antiquity. In the alternative, I suppose for the physical sciences the argument could be that everything was known, so technological progress was no longer possible.Report

My understanding from Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast is that Gibbon is still a valuable source, worth reading, it’s just you have to account for his biases and narrative pre-conceptions (which is not really that different than any other source)

I am at the edge of where I know what I am talking about–or perhaps a bit past the edge, so take this as me breaking wind.

That being said, history books age out just like science books–just not as fast. In a way, they age out more thoroughly than do science books. You could read a classical mechanics textbook from a hundred years ago and the content should hold up just fine. Classical mechanics has been thoroughly understood for a long time, and other advances such as quantum mechanics or relativity don’t really matter here.

The same isn’t true with history. Gibbon had a body of literary texts from late antiquity to work with. A modern historian has a substantially larger body of texts, what with stuff constantly turning up moldering in some monastic library. This isn’t just incidental material. Stuff like sermons of St. Augustine have bubbled up to the surface. Add to this a quarter millennium’s worth of archaeology, which was in its infancy in Gibbon’s time.

I am guessing that Duncan speaks well of Gibbon partly to give a point of contact with his audience. The crowd that listens to that podcast are likely to at least heard of Gibbon, if not having actually read him, much less in its entirety. Also, he was a fine prose stylist, and legitimately admired on that account.

Finally, any historian is also, within his field, a historiographer. Part of my early baseball research is reading both older and newer histories of early baseball, even when I know going in that they are utter crap. It is important to know what non-specialists think about the subject, and even more important to check any unexamined assumptions I might hold on the subject. Gibbon is the great ape of Late Antiquity studies. He is an unavoidable point of reference.Report

Duncan does talk extensively about historiography throughout his podcasts. I may be mischaracterizing Duncan’s view on Gibbon; what I specifically remember is him saying something like ‘for the next few podcasts, Gibbon is one of the sources.’

I’ve been listening to Revolutions lately. Really good stuff. Havn’t done his Rome podcast but there is so much Rome stuff already out there and i already have a good rome cast i’m going through.Report

I came across his stuff sometime a year or two ago; I forget how now (here?).

I do remember that my entry point was the English revolution, and by the time I had caught up with his then current story (Latin American?) I went back and checked out Rome while I was awaiting more Content.Report

I suppose for the physical sciences the argument could be that everything was known, so technological progress was no longer possible.

Since I started out picking on the 1899 example… Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of US Patent Office, in 1899: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

I have long maintained that “Engineers are gonna engineer,” be that a matter of making a better stick for digging up tubers or improving the FTL drive so Andromeda is within reach. As necessary, if there aren’t already scientists and mathematicians, some of the engineers will do science and math research. We’re supposed to buy into the notion that in an entire galaxy, Hari Seldon is the only person doing original research? And I note, just in passing, that no sooner has Hari come up with his breakthrough mathematics than he turns into an uber-engineer, attempting to manipulate the whole galaxy.Report

H.G. Wells theorized something that seems a bit like atomic bombs destroying and rendering unusable most of the major cities of the world in his dud of a novel The World Set Free, published in 1913. What he described was a “continuous explosion,” but a super-weapon of some sort having caused massive destruction and leaving enduring scars on the landscape was within imagination.

For our purposes, we can imagine a psychohistorian making plausible assumptions about incremental advances in technology. Computers will grow faster and smaller and more powerful. Power generation and recycling of certain materials will become more efficient. Things like that. Plus, they’ve been telling me for the past forty years that we’re about twenty years away from practical fusion power on an industrial scale, and maybe this time they’re right.Report

So I, the psychohistorian, put “assume a super-bomb” into my equations. Assign whatever probabilities I want, but the question still comes down to “Will they use it, either on purpose or by accident?” Glitches came disturbingly close to triggering launches on more than one occasion. And there’s always the possibility of a Mule, in the form of a psychopath who comes to power and pushes the button.

Given CRISPR, what are the odds that we get a Death of Grass virus? Assume all grain-producing grass variants die off over the next three years. What’s that do to your forecast?

Another disturbing, although unstated, aspect of the series is that there are thousands (millions?) of planets, and the psychohistorians can lose a lot of them and still have things work out. In the same vein as what so many people have noted before, a 25% chance that the super-bomb will get used is 100% for the people who live on the planets where it happens.Report

Well, for that, you’re going to have to ask a psychohistorian. Though I find dark amusement in the notion of a space alien unable to penetrate our language but observing our progress through technology wondering just what the hell those people in Nevada and Kazakhstan were doing that was so awful, and why they insisted on keeping it up anyway.Report

Well, sort of. There’s a certain resemblance to parents who say to their misbehaving children, “Stop that! This time I really mean it!” Given that they never actually nuked Reno, or Las Vegas, or any of the smaller population centers.Report

My complaint about the Foundation universe is that technicalogical progress — aside from psychohistory itself, an advancement in math — seems to have essentially stopped.

Well we know for a fact that technological progress isn’t linear. Just comparing the last couple of centuries to the sum of history prior has people talking about singularities since the progress appears exponential or geometric.

But is that realistic? Can technological progress just keep advancing faster and faster forever? I would predict something more like an S-shaped curve–slow at first, then getting more rapid, and then tapering off and eventually slowing to something resembling stasis.Report

I admit that I didn’t expect people to argue about the technology thing. I expected to get hammered on my implicit statement that a 1950 where the two nuclear-armed superpowers in a cold war were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would be as correct as a US/USSR prediction.Report

implicit statement that a 1950 where the two nuclear-armed superpowers in a cold war were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would be as correct as a US/USSR prediction.

If you know that nukes are going to be invented (which is a real trick), the United States going nuclear armed was foreseeable. We had the resources to throw at the problem. It was unclear what was the correct pathway to success so we tried everything while everyone else had a budget. However everyone else failing seems less predictable.

I could way more easily see Nazi Germany + US as the nuclear powers than US/USSR depending on the year in which I’m making the guess and the amount of information I have. (Opinions may vary but) Germany and the US seem a lot more science focused than the 1940’s USSR and Japan. If Germany gets the bomb, a nuclear Germany nukes Moscow (decapting it’s leadership and thus saving the bulk of the German army) and London, and then sues for peace with the USA.

It’s 1920 and Germany is in a shambles. You don’t see WW2 coming much less that it will be everyone against Germany.

It’s 1940 and Germany is on top of the world and looks unstoppable. The USSR is allied with the USA.

It’s 1960, Germany lost. USSR and USA are bitter rivals.

It’s 1980 and the USSR is on top of the world, the cold war is in full swing. It could go on a long time.

It’s 2000 and the USSR has fallen apart.

This type of mass long term prediction is really hard, not just because there’s not enough information but because that information itself is highly political. Nazi Germany and the USSR are hardly going to be open about the weaknesses in their systems, to the extent they admit they exist they’re actively going to be trying to fix them.

WW1 being “inevitable” is largely armchair quarterbacking and the powers that be trying to minimize their failures. Nazi Germany could have, if not totally won the war, not had a total defeat. If Hitler and/or Stalin hadn’t dodged one of the assassination attempts, the outcome of the war would probably had been very different. Invading Russian in the winter seems like an unforced error. If Stalin had died maybe Russia falls to infighting.

Note “different” doesn’t have to mean “less nasty”. Hitler was very much against chemical weapons because of his experiences in WW1, a different leader could have felt different. Worst case, a different line up of people might have prioritized the creation of the nuke and managed to make it work.

I get that lots of stuff averages out and doesn’t matter, but a nuclear armed Hitler not balanced by Stalin seems like something that would have long term effects.Report

A nitpick: Operation Barbarossa kicked off on June 22. There is a plausible argument that even this date was an unforced error, with the invasion delayed while the Germans putzed around in Greece cleaning up Mussolini’s mess. Would starting a month earlier have made any difference in the long run? Maybe. Probably not, but it isn’t impossible.Report

Actually, it was not. Germany had done quite well on the Eastern Front in WWI. Meanwhile, their tech base for waging large area warfare – aircraft, trucks, tanks, and radios – had radically improved.Report

From August 2018 through February 2019, AVENATTI defrauded a client (“Victim-1”) by diverting money owed to Victim-1 to AVENATTI’s control and use. After assisting Victim-1 in securing a book contract, AVENATTI allegedly stole a significant portion of Victim-1’s advance on that contract. He did so by, among other things, sending a fraudulent and unauthorized letter purporting to contain Victim-1’s signature to Victim-1’s literary agent, which instructed the agent to send payments not to Victim-1 but to a bank account controlled by AVENATTI. As alleged, Victim-1 had not signed or authorized the letter, and did not even know of its existence.

Specifically, prior to Victim-1’s literary agent wiring the second of four installment payments due to Victim-1 as part of the book advance, AVENATTI sent a letter to Victim-1’s literary agent purportedly signed by Victim-1 that instructed the literary agent to send all future payments to a client trust account in Victim-1’s name and controlled by AVENATTI. The literary agent then wired $148,750 to the account, which AVENATTI promptly began spending for his own purposes, including on airfare, hotels, car services, restaurants and meal delivery, online retailers, payroll for his law firm and another business he owned, and insurance. When Victim-1 began inquiring of AVENATTI as to why Victim-1 had not received the second installment, AVENATTI lied to Victim-1, telling Victim-1 that he was still attempting to obtain the payment from Victim-1’s publisher. Approximately one month after diverting the payment, AVENATTI used funds recently received from another source to pay $148,750 to Victim-1, so that Victim-1 would not realize that AVENATTI had previously taken and used Victim-1’s money.

Approximately one week later, pursuant to AVENATTI’s earlier fraudulent instructions, the literary agent sent another payment of $148,750 of Victim-1’s book advance to the client account controlled by AVENATTI. AVENATTI promptly began spending the money for his own purposes, including to make payments to individuals with whom AVENATTI had a personal relationship, to make a monthly lease payment on a luxury automobile, and to pay for airfare, dry cleaning, hotels, restaurants and meals, payroll, and insurance costs. Moreover, to conceal his scheme, and despite repeated requests to AVENATTI, as Victim-1’s lawyer, for assistance in obtaining the book payment that Victim-1 believed was missing, AVENATTI led Victim-1 to believe that Victim-1’s publisher was refusing to make the payment to the literary agent, when, as AVENATTI knew, the publisher had made the payment to the literary agent, who had then sent the money to AVENATTI pursuant to AVENATTI’s fraudulent instructions.

Here are my principal conclusions:1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

Rep. Justin Amash, a critic of President Trump who entertained a run against him in 2020, became the first Republican congressman to say the president “engaged in impeachable conduct.”

The Michigan lawmaker, often the lone Trump dissenter on his side of the aisle, shared his conclusions in a lengthy Twitter thread after reviewing the full special counsel report.

Amash wrote that after reading the 448-page report, he’d concluded that not only did Robert S. Mueller’s team show Trump attempting to obstruct justice, but that Attorney General William Barr had “deliberately misrepresented” the findings and that few members of Congress had even read it. “Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash wrote.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The president often says the report found “no collusion, no obstruction,” though neither is true. Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, which did interfere in the 2016 election. He did not rule on the obstruction of justice question, saying it was something Congress should determine.

Amash, who was first elected to Congress in 2010, declined on Sunday to rule out a possible 2020 presidential run as a Libertarian candidate.

"Well, I would never rule anything out. That's not on my radar right now," he said of a 2020 bid to Tapper. "But I think that it is important that we have someone in there who is presenting a vision for America that is different from what these two parties are presenting."

Amash told Tapper he believes there is a "wild amount of partisan rhetoric on both sides" and that "Congress is totally broken."

"I think that we need to return to basic American principles, talk about what we have in common as a people -- because I believe we have a lot in common as Americans -- and try to move forward together, rather than fighting each other all the time," Amash said.

Question remains, is Justin Amash going to join any Democrat effort to curtail the president, or is he using this as prelude to something else -- such as his own run for the White House? Drama.

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Elizabeth Warren Is Rooting for Daenerys Targaryen in ‘Game of Thrones’

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is a Game of Thrones fan, and her favorite character is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen, who Warren says, “has been my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire.” We learned this in a column Warren wrote for The Cut published Sunday evening.

In the piece, Warren outlines her reasons for her fandom. Daenerys is fair, she fights for the people, and she wants to end slavery. But in talking about Daenerys, Warren can also, subtly, talk about herself. Like the paragraph below, in which she describes the Dragon Queen—or is she describing herself?

“This is a revolutionary idea, in Westeros or anywhere else. A queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful? A ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known? It’s no wonder that the people she meets in Westeros are skeptical. Skeptical, because they’ve seen another kind of woman on the Iron Throne: the villain we love to hate, Queen Cersei of Casterly Rock.”

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If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'ld jump the life to come. But [...]